The Movie That Destroyed Independence And Optimism By Making Everyone Listen
Posted by Joshua Tyler | Published
The 1990s are now, in the minds of many, replacing the 1950s as humanity’s golden age. The Internet was in its infancy, the economy was booming, and so was American innovation and culture.
In 1994, during that period there was a film that was broadcast worldwide. An imaginative tale of hope and optimism, a reimagining of the path America took to reach a brighter and brighter future, as told through the eyes of one foolish man.
Or that’s what the movie seemed to be. In fact, it may be the first big step down. Whether you knew it or not, while you were watching Forrest Gumpscreen.
Forrest Gump’s Philosophy of Perfect Obedience
Forrest Gump it starts with a feather floating in the air. It has no weight, no impact, and no center. The feather goes wherever the wind blows it, without complaining, confident that everything will be alright in the end.
Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get out of it. Life is like a feather floating in the air. There is no way of knowing which way the wind is blowing; all you can do is let it move you.
There’s no way to know what you’re putting in your mouth, just keep eating and accept whatever comes next that touches your tongue.
It is a philosophy of total obedience and abdication of agency, abdication of responsibility, and it is something that no ordinary person can agree with. That’s why it’s easy to dismiss Forrest Gump just like a movie.
To make that kind of crazy message stick, you’ll need to move beyond the talk about a box of chocolates into the secret, weapons-grade world of psychological persuasion. So that’s it Forrest Gump he did.
Let’s start this off by saying that Jenny is in the middle of everything, but not because she’s a secret villain, which is typical edgy. Forrest Gump take it. He is by no means a secret criminal, he is an open criminal, but he is a criminal designed to serve a secret purpose.
Before I explain that, you need to understand the film itself.
Forrest Gump Triggers an Emotional Reaction to Get the Audience Uplifted
Forrest Gump it’s well done and marketed as a feel-good tale about kindness and decency. It’s so good at capturing emotion and making the audience feel like it’s almost impossible to see what he’s doing through tears. And that’s exactly why it works.
When I was training as a hypnotist, most of my early lessons revolved around how to initiate a person into a hypnotic state. One of the best and most effective ways is to create an emotional response. Psychologists sometimes call this emotional stimulation. Mindfulness takes advantage of the fact that strong emotions disable critical thinking and increase suggestibility.
One of the most unique things Forrest Gump it is its structure. It is not a single, continuous story. Rather, it is a series of short vignettes, set at different times in Gump’s life.
Each Vignette begins a story, and ends with a stirring emotional state. It is timed so that as each new segment begins, the audience is in a strong emotional state created by the last one.
We feel Forrest’s embarrassment as he is teased for being dumb. Fear in the jungles of Vietnam. Unbearable grief over the death of his mother. As the audience is constantly encouraged, Forrest Gump then uses that to deliver something subtle: a moral play where obedience is rewarded again independent thought is punished.
All of that is so wrapped up in nostalgia and sympathy that you don’t even have to notice it.
Forrest Gump as a Compliance Officer
From the beginning, Forrest Gump is a follower of the law, no matter how bad the laws around him are. The film begins with Forrest relaying the things his mother told him and explaining how he followed her instructions.
The entire film becomes an exercise in obedience to Forrest Gump, a man who questions nothing, and the script makes that work for the audience by portraying him as a man of limited intelligence.
Of course, Forrest just obeys; he is not smart enough to do anything else. But why Forrest complies is not as important from a persuasion perspective as he is it is compatibleand the film makes the audience appreciate his compliance.
Forrest succeeds because he does what he is told. Not figuratively. Literally.
Run, Forrest. He runs.
Join the army. You join.
Play ping-pong. You’re kidding.
Invest in shrimp. You plant.
Forrest never asks for instructions from anyone. He never resists authority. He never checks the results. He really doesn’t choose. He agrees, and the universe is showering him with rewards. Treasure. Fame. Love. Respect. The glamorous life is delivering one order at a time.
The film puts this as innocence. But structurally, it is perfect obedience.
Listening to his mother and Jenny. He listens to the situation that sends him to die in the forest and plays ping pong. Obedience is Forrest Gump’s whole life. He has no agency, and it is celebrated.
One of the times that Forrest shows any agency is in his failed attempt to rescue Jenny, when he sees her making out with a boy in a car and mistakenly thinks she’s being hurt. You scold him, tell him that he is wrong.
So it goes back to doing what he is told. Meanwhile, after apologizing and returning to compliance, Jenny rewards her by removing her top.
Forrest Enters a Holding Pattern When No One Is Listening
When Forrest’s mother dies, and he runs away from people to listen, Forrest spends his time mowing the lawn. Back and forth, back and forth, locked in a holding pattern while waiting for his next command.
When Jenny leaves him, that pattern repeats itself. Forrest helps celebrate. Back and forth, back and forth, waiting for his next instructions. Like a feather blown by the wind.
Moral Hacking and Forrest Gump
The character of Forrest Gump is a textbook example of the persuasion technique called Moral Laundering. In Moral Laundering, an unpopular or objectionable idea is made more acceptable by attaching it to a trustworthy, heroic, or morally respected person, allowing the person’s perceived virtue to carry over into the message.
Demoralization alone would not be enough to convince the audience to view total compliance as appropriate. So the film provides a contrast to our obedient hero, using our old friend, Poisoning the Well.
Poisoning the Well is a concept we talked about a lot in Screenwashed, and it’s the polar opposite of Moral Laundering.
In Poisoning the Well, you have a villain who says something good, to make people think that the good thing is as cruel as the person who says it.
Both Moral Washing and Source Poisoning take advantage of moral asymmetry.
Behavioral asymmetry the tendency of people to judge the same behavior as morally acceptable or unacceptable depending on who did it, rather than the behavior itself.
Forrest Gump is used to denigrate the idea that perfect obedience is the right pattern of behavior, while another character poisons the well against self-righteousness. Who is the last free thinker in Forrest Gump? Jenny.
Jenny’s Refusal to Follow the Rules Reveals Forrest Gump’s True Purpose
From the moment we meet Jenny, she refuses to listen and follow the crowd. Forrest is taken by the children around him. Jenny doesn’t have it; he defies the authority of bullies and becomes his friend.
Throughout the film, Jenny asks. Jenny is rebellious. Jenny does the unexpected. If he faces abuse from someone in authority, he walks away from it. He abandons traditional ways. He challenges authority. He explores politics, gender, and culture.
As a result, the film destroys him. It destroys him narratively by making his life a disaster, but it also destroys him in the eyes of the audience by making him a villain. He does this by expressing his independence through actions and ideas that most of the audience will find intolerable, and then turns his relationship with Forrest into one where he is taken advantage of.
The movie makes Jenny the villain on purpose, not by accident, as some critics seem to think. Every time Jenny exercises, the film punishes her with escalating consequences: abuse, addiction, illness, and isolation. His curiosity was classified as indifference. His disrespect is rewritten as self-harm. His independence becomes a pathology.
This is not a subtle matter. It fixes it.
Jenny Suffers Only When She Agrees To This
The film pretends that Jenny’s suffering is the result of “bad choices,” but it carefully sets up the game so that every choice other than obedience leads to pain. There is no version of Jenny’s life in which self-centeredness works. The audience is trained, scene by scene, to associate his independence with tragedy.
Even worse, Jenny is only redeemed when she stops rebelling.
He returned home. They are stable. He just kept quiet. The one who is sick. It depends. His independence is taken away, too only there are you allowed happiness. Just briefly, before he died.
The message is error free: a self-centered person must be broken before he can be accepted.
Forrest, meanwhile, doesn’t change at all. He is not growing. He doesn’t study. He is rewarded precisely because he remains constant and never uses any agency. He never thought about himself. He always listens.
This is not an accident. It’s a narrative device designed to make submission feel good and independence feel dangerous.
Forrest Gump Wants You to Think You Have No Agency
In the final moments of the film, Forrest tells the audience that there are only two possibilities in life: that everything is fate or that everything is planned. Either possibility has one thing in common: you have no agency, no say in whatever happens to you. By the time the feather floats, the audience has been trained to believe that those two truths are the only possible ones, and that the best way to live is to follow orders, trust the plan, and not ask why.
Life is a box of chocolates, too Forrest Gump it teaches you to sit back and let life put whatever it wants in your mouth. So you enjoy someone who doesn’t ask. He mourns the person who does that. You walk around thinking that’s how the world works and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
Congratulations, obedient slaves, you have been washed.
